New Hampshire Debate: The Ghost of George W. Bush

I have no idea who “won” last night’s debate, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because historically these early forums have almost no relevance to the final outcome of the following year’s nominating season. But there was a clear loser last night: George W. Bush. While Barack Obama may have been the person most vilified from the podiums of the seven Republican candidates in New Hampshire, it was Bush and his legacy that suffered the most.

On nearly every major issue, Bush haunted the stage. A hallmark of Bush’s post-September 11th leadership was a public-relations offensive to show the world that America did not discriminate against Muslims. Just six days after the terrorist attacks, Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., on Massachusetts Avenue, and talked about interfaith coöperation. “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith,” Bush said. “And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.” Bush quoted the Koran, and used language he would repeat for years: “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” No Republican Presidential candidate uses anything close to Bush’s old formulation when talking about Islam these days.

Last night, the moderator, John King, confronted Herman Cain with his recent statement that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet, and his concern that “a lot of Muslims are not totally dedicated to this country.” Cain helpfully explained:

First, the statement was would I be comfortable with a Muslim in my Administration, not that I wouldn’t appoint one. That’s the exact transcript. And I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims, those that are trying to kill us. And so, when I said I wouldn’t be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones that are trying to kill us, number one.

He then went on to warn that America must not allow Sharia law to take root in our courts.

What is remarkable is not that Cain, who has never been an elected official and holds little sway over other Republicans, said this, but that none of his six colleagues who do or have held positions of distinction interrupted him or followed up to express even mild outrage over his remarks. (Newt Gingrich did interject to suggest that Muslim Americans may need to swear an oath of loyalty to serve in government.) After being directly asked for a response to the comments, Romney came the closest to criticizing Cain’s old-fashioned bigotry, saying, “We recognize that the people of all faiths are welcome in this country. Our nation was founded on a principle of religious tolerance.” Nobody mounted an actual defense of a religion practiced by some four million Americans and a quarter of the world.

When it came to foreign policy, there was another notable moment of backlash against the Bush years. A voter named John Brown asked, “Osama bin Laden is dead. We’ve been in Afghanistan for ten years. Isn’t it time to bring our combat troops home from Afghanistan?” Not long ago, most Republicans answered such a question by immediately declaring that troops could not come home until victory on the battlefield was achieved. Nobody used that formulation last night.

It wasn’t so surprising when Ron Paul said, “I’d bring them home as quickly as possible. And I would get them out of Iraq, as well. And I wouldn’t start a war in Libya. I’d quit bombing Yemen. And I’d quit bombing Pakistan.” But it was striking that Romney used almost the exact same language as President Obama when discussing Afghanistan. “It’s time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can,” Romney said, “consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to the [Afghan] military in a way that they’re able to defend themselves from the Taliban.” He added, “I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.”

Afghanistan was not the only issue on which candidates sounded a lot less like George W. Bush and more like Ron Paul. When it comes to government spending and bailouts, the issue that burns the hottest among conservatives these days, the candidates came alive with stinging rebukes of policies that all began in the Bush years. Romney called the bailouts a failure and accurately pointed out “the Bush administration and the Obama administration wrote checks to the auto industry” before he attacked that policy.

“We should not have had a TARP,” former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum added. “We should not have had the auto bailout. Governor Romney’s right. They could have gone through a structured bankruptcy without the federal government.” He did not point out that every dime of TARP money Obama used was appropriated with the help of Republicans in Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush.

Michele Bachmann, who impressed many commentators last night, made the clearest statement about how the current anti-Bush surge of populism among Republicans actually began in the last days of that Administration. “I was behind closed doors with Secretary Paulson when he came and made the extraordinary, never-before-made request to Congress: Give us a seven-hundred-billion-dollar blank check with no strings attached,” she said. “And I fought behind closed doors against my own party on TARP. It was a wrong vote then. It’s continued to be a wrong vote since then. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. You have to take principle over your party.” What she did not need to say is that the views of her once-maligned faction have now taken over the party of George W. Bush.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.